Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Reading Heim’s translation, I was struck by a fine but pervasive difference between it and the Death in Venice I remembered. It goes without saying that the basic events are the same. In both versions Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German author who finds himself, as Dante put it, “In the middle of the journey of [his] life…in a dark wood, where the right road had been lost sight of” (from Seamus Heaney’s 1993 translation), goes on a holiday in hope of reviving his fading enthusiasm for life. He travels to Venice, where he becomes first enamored of and then obsessed by a fourteen-year-old Polish boy named Tadzio, who is, in fleshly form, the very ideal of youthful human beauty, with all youth and beauty can imply to the no-longer-young about yearning, mortality, and the extravagant carelessness of a god who gives us life and then, by slow degrees, takes it back again. Aschenbach is increasingly consumed by his passion, until he dies on the beach at the Lido, done up in a grotesque parody of youth, rouged and lipsticked, watching Tadzio from afar. And yet, the tone of Aschenbach’s decline felt different in Heim’s version.